A business information, business intelligence, and/or enterprise system can improve an organization's ability to monitor and manage data in a complex business environment. For example, systems may provide components and tools that allow users to monitor, retrieve, view and manipulate business information, including business warehouse data stored and maintained as part of a company's overall business intelligence tools. By way of examples only, business information might be associated with a number of different product lines, profit values, customer groups, fiscal years, distribution regions, product costs, product quantities, revenues, and/or dates. Moreover, the business information may be stored and retrieved in a variety of ways. Examples of data sources include databases, such as, relational, transactional, hierarchical, multidimensional (e.g., OLAP), object oriented databases, and the like. Further data sources may include tabular data (e.g., spreadsheets, delimited text files), data tagged with a markup language (e.g., XML data), transactional data, unstructured data (e.g., text files, screen scrapings), hierarchical data (e.g., data in a file system, XML data), files, a plurality of reports, and any other data source accessible through an established protocol, such as, Open DataBase Connectivity (“ODBC”) and the like.
A user may be interested in retrieving some of the stored business information for a variety of reasons, such as to explore the information or to create a display or report that shows the information. The user may, for example, access a client device (e.g., a personal computer) to view business information from a remote server. The business information might include, for example, information about consumer patterns (e.g., sales order volumes for the current year) displayed in a graphical format. When the client device requests information from the server, the server may retrieve real-time information from one or more enterprise databases and transmit the appropriate data to the client device. Such an approach, however, can be time consuming (e.g., retrieving the real time information from the enterprise databases might take thirty seconds) which can be annoying and frustrating for a user—especially when he or she frequently accesses the business information (e.g., on a home view or overview business information page).
It may therefore be desirable to provide improved methods and systems to facilitate an efficient access and display of business information to a user.